Hit hard for the holidays...

So, my copy of Im@s Best of 765+876 Vol. 2 Limited Edition came in today after like... two months of waiting for it to come back in stock and like... two weeks of waiting for shipping. Did it get stuck in customs?

Whatever, it's here, and it's... huge. The big thing it comes with is the lyrics book, which is about as tall as the screen on my 20.1 inch monitor. Now it's time to rip the thing to my hard drive.

Oh, yeah. Exact Audio Copy hates Unicode and freeDB. What. The. Crap. So I gotta do it by hand.

Just so that you can see, Exact Audio Copy says the CD artist is: ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????. Geez, maybe I ought to find another ripper that can do this. Man, my IME is going to have these idols' names down pat.

Putting all that aside, though, MSRP was 3200 JPY, I got it for 34 USD including shipping, which is just awesome. The MSRP is what, $42 or so? Now that it's run is complete, nowadays you'll find it for 4500 little juicy parties, which is like $60 or something. I'm really quite happy... until I realize that I need to get the rest of them now.

... And the fact that the book was a little beat up is a bit of a downer, but eh, this is online shopping we're talking about here.

UPDATE 2 hours later: So, upon looking at the daunting task of figuring out in which order idols are listed in song credits, I thought I'd look online. What I found: the problem is not Exact Audio Copy, it is the specific freeDB database you're accessing wanting Latin characters and putting the hate on other character sets.

If you're using freeDB for Japanese songs, point your freeDB settings to the server at:

http://freedbtest.dyndns.org:80/~cddb/cddb.cgi

That'll solve the problem real quick.